Syngman Rhee

Syngman Rhee (18 April 1875-19 July 1965) was President of South Korea from 24 July 1948 to 26 April 1960, preceding Yun Posun. The first President of the Republic of Korea, he led South Korea through the Korean War and ordered tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings of suspected communists. In 1960, a student revolution forced him to resign as President, and he died in exile in Hawaii.

Biography
Syngman Rhee was born in Pyongsan, Choson Korea in 1875, and he became a nationalist activist while still a student, joining the Independence Club on its formation in 1896. After imprisonment for an alleged attempt to overthrow the monarchy (1898 to 1904), he studied in the United States to gain a doctorate degree in political science at Princeton. Briefly in Korea from 1910 to 1912, he was expelled by the Japanese colonial authorities, and then founded a Korean nationalist society in the USA. In 1919, he was named in absentia Premier of the Provisional Government of Korea in Shanghai, a body set up by nationalist opponents of the Japanese colonial regime. This position, as well as his connections with the USA, predestined him to lead US-occupied South Korea to statehood, becoming its first President. In office, he relied heavily on US support to fend off various communist insurgencies, before almost succumbing to North Korean invasion in the Korean War. Never relinquishing his claim to represent all of Korea, he was bitterly opposed to the end of the war and the USA's de facto acceptance of the country's division. While the first years of his leadership were thus taken up with the threat of a communist takeover, after 1953 attention shifted to his own corruption, and his attempts to erode the constitution in order to extend his powers. He suppressed all forms of popular protest, until this became impossible in the wake of the 1960 presidential elections. He resigned and went into exile in Hawaii, where he died.